COVID-19 School Dashboard: Reopen Evidence

Follow the link for the full summary:https://markusacademy.substack.com/p/covid-19-school-dashboard-reopen 

Explore the webinar series:https://markusacademy.substack.com/archive

On November 5, 2020, Emily Oster joined Markus' Academy for a talk on her COVID-19 school dashboard and evidence around reopening schools. Oster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University.

Download the slides here.

● Remote learning is not as effective as in-person learning, particularly for lower-income students. Earlier work showed that student performance on Zearn, an online math program, declined by larger amounts among lower-income children at the start of the pandemic. Oster argues that if we can get kids back to school, we should.

● The biggest risk of opening elementary schools is virus spread from adult-to-adult. While children can still get and spread COVID-19, health risks to children are lower than other groups, and some recent research suggests living with children doesn't increase the likelihood of getting COVID-19.

● Because no national or state-level data collection system was built over the summer, Oster worked with schools and districts to collect this information and post it anonymously to her COVID-19 School Response Dashboard. New data is posted every two weeks and covers about 3 million students, including 1.6 million attending school in-person.

● Data from the dashboard suggests case rates at schools are not alarming and schools are not driving infections. Oster hypothesizes that low transmission in schools may be due to the structured environment, as outbreaks tend to be driven by unstructured social activities. She argues that if local areas restrict in-person schooling, those restrictions should apply consistently to other activities as well.